We left it last night switched off with the VGA plugged in to a monitor.

Upon trying to boot it up this morning we get a series of beeps.. Its eight short beeps with a gap between the first and second, fourth and fifth and the seventh and eighth beeps. Its kinda hard to identify whether the gaps signify long beeps but they all sound short to me so it goes 1beep 3beep 3beep 1beep. I've looked this up but I can't find anything, only similar things. Its a bit ambiguous.

I've a feeling the VGA card has pulled on the graphics card but having opened the back I can't figure out what I should be doing.. I'm a bit of a noob with laptops to be honest. Housemate doesn't know either.

II have a photo of the back of the laptop. There are two exposed wires which may have something to do with it but I have no idea what they are...

Well, the "user guide" shows that exact beep code sequence but does not give any information as to a possible cause.

From page 135 "Beep errors- Problem: One short beep,pause,three short beeps,pause,three more short beeps,and one short beep. Solution: Have the computer serviced". From my experience that usually signifies a motherboard issue and isn't something that resetting the CMOS will fix. You can try using only 1 stick of ram at a time in case one has failed or a slot (unlikely). There are BIOS updates available as well from this year but I don't believe you can get the machine to even POST so that would not be a possibility either.

The "VGA card" is your GPU unless you have no dedicated graphics card and only have the Intel integrated graphics in which case minor damage to the VGA port should not cause any real issues to the overall system. What the specs sheet on their site states it does have an Nvidia 730 GT and the VGA port would normally be soldered to that part of the motherboard. The GPU is not "separate" as you can see in this picture the GPU itself should be the chip just to the right of the CPU socket.

The Red and Blue wires are used for a WAN card which would socket in that empty area just to the right of your wireless LAN card (see pg 81 of the manual).